No longer true.Ian Kingston wrote:Apart from the copyright issue, there is also the practical problem that in order to get the pages to lie flat on a typical scanner most books have to be dismantled. Otherwise you ended up with a distorted or illegible inside margin for each page. This may not be a problem for books where there are duplicates (so that one can be sacrificed), but for single copies of old or valuable books it may not be an acceptable solution.
Something like 15 years ago Google came up with their Google Books Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books) with the intention of scanning all the books in the world. The problem you describe was obviously one they had to solve as this article describes - http://computer.howstuffworks.com/google-books1.htm
Perhaps the ECF should forward a list of their oldest and rarest books to Google who might very well do the job for free as part of their project?